Agencies hire and train workers with developmental disabilities

FRUITS OF LABOR: Products packaged or assembled by developmentally disabled workers is shown off by Shasta County Opportunity Center Manager Del Lockwood.

The typical employer may avoid this workforce, but agencies like Shasta County's Opportunity Center, J and B Programs, Inc. and new business Noah's are banking on them. With the unemployment rate for developmentally disabled people at 75 percent nationwide, certain agencies and businesses are finding ways to profit and to help.

Shasta County's Opportunity Center currently provides employment opportunities for about 250 people each year. Employment ranges from janitorial work at Anderson's city hall, teen center and police station to job placement at Holiday Quality Foods in Cottonwood, Opportunity Center Manager Del Lockwood said.

"Those from Happy Valley are our longest commutes," Lockwood said. "If we didn't provide transportation, they wouldn't be able to work. They want a place to live and work like anyone else."

"They'll do work nobody else will," Phil Burnett, owner of Noah's said. "It's menial labor, but it's gold to these guys."

Noah's, which opened for business on April 1, hires developmentally disabled people for landscaping work, construction clean-up and felling oak trees, Burnett said.

While the Opportunity Center is located on the north side of Redding, the center also operates work crews throughout the county performing janitorial and landscaping work.Aside from providing mail service for Shasta County offices, the center provides for manufacturing, assembly and packaging needs of local inventors and industries.

The term developmentally disabled was coined for people with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, autism, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury or other similar cognitive disabilities, Lockwood said.